


our twofold shadows

by sazzafraz



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Budapest, F/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, vague horror overtones
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-14
Updated: 2012-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-12 03:29:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazzafraz/pseuds/sazzafraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s about ghosts, it’s about myths, it’s about Wednesdays, it’s about what you take and who you can leave behind. (Budapest, folklore and the elasticity of the human mind.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	our twofold shadows

**Author's Note:**

> In which I continue to do everything wrong.
> 
> Budapest; probably not as anyone wants it.

The thing about Budapest is that _nothing fucking happened in Budapest._

That’s Fury’s line anyway, _nothing happened, you weren’t there, forget about it or-_

Well, there are a lot of _ors_ there but an _or else_ will be just fine.

Natasha does. Clint doesn’t.

\--

Nulla: and if the city never sleeps that makes two

\--

The history of a city is a song.

It’s the burst of rhythm in streets, of babies born in houses, hospitals. Of revolutions being born too, like thunderclaps; stamping down cobbles and pavement. It is a thousand hissing voices. It is the clang of church bells. It is the desolate silence of 3am.

Budapest is a city and it has a song. 

\--

Natasha arrives on a Wednesday, like clockwork, at the second most expensive hotel in Budapest.

It’s always the second because her marks have a tendency to swarm to either end of the wealth vs stealth spectrum. Some are so into the idea that who they are begets who they should look like; the ones who have designer written into every aspect of their life, who slip along the _avant garde, avant_ _tacky_ line. They choose the best hotel, the highest floor, the biggest trail. _Here we are, come get us._ Then there are what she thinks of as the Nick Fury’s of the fishpond. You’ll never catch them, you’ll never see them, it will be guesswork and luck to get them, but you know who they are and where they are anyway because there are patterns intrinsic to the over paranoid.

Staying in the second best gives her the necessary appearance and cover for option a and frankly, option b are going to make her go to hell and back for it so she might as well be comfortable.

She unpacks her bags, more clothes than she needs, makes it look like she’s staying for awhile. Takes out two folders and puts them both on the bed. One for the man she’s going to kill and one for a man who’s already gone. She feels it slip, something leaving her (herself leaving her; Natasha Romanov exit pursued by memories) and feels the otherness slip in. A different shade of her looks at the room, at the dossier and at what she’ll have to do next.

The dossier is on the bed, the bed is in the blue and gold room, the room is in the hotel and the hotel is in Budapest. Natasha Romanov isn’t in the room but Natalia Romanova, Lost Daughter and Agent of Things Old and Large is.

\--

Four days into her six day trip and she’s seen as much of the city as she can stand. There are voices, constant sounds, the banging of war drums and the slick steps of the Huns that follow her. If she looks behind too long she swears she can see the blood dripping out and trailing after her. Lost lovers. _Dead_ lovers. All of them chasing her through streets, following the trail of red. The history of Europe has exactly three things to say-

-we are here

-we are bloody

-we are here and _bloody noisy_

And when you’re _Natalia Romanova_ and your head is constantly _open-_

Well, Europe has a whole other definition.

\--

Tomorrow is a Sunday though and tomorrow she’ll add another life to the war drums.

\--

‘You should go the other way,’ he says conversationally, ‘I’ve got bets with the guy who hung himself three streets over that you’ll get caught out.’

Natasha ignores him, checks the knives along her back, the gun strapped to her thigh under the loose dress. She takes the left path, upwind, the sunshine reflecting and almost overblown. The street is singing with people, cafes, gossip, the kind of place people find themselves in without trying. Point for her she found it at all. 

He clucks his tongue, ‘You should go right, Natalia. It would make more sense to go right.’

She closes her eyes. _Thirteen steps_ , she thinks, _pivot, throw, duck, scream for the throw off, run_.

‘Go right, he’s on the third building, fifth room, notched right at you. _Go right._ ’

Her mind catches on _notched_ and the press of his cold palm on her neck. _Get out, get out._ But she’s 13 steps in, half way into a pivot and she lets the knife slide from her fingers.

The tip of a knife finds itself in the man’s throat. The throat of a murderer, of a torturer, the blood of a man that takes little girls minds and _ruins them._ She screams. She runs. Footsteps following after. She feels when he bursts to life on the other side. A snap like a band in her mind. Another ghost to carry in her head. She feels it too, with the urgent whisper on her neck, when Clint realises what she’s done. That there is a dead man in the street and she put him there. There’s no time wasted, he leaps down the stairs, past the ghost of a little girl who died centuries ago, past the screaming grandmothers in the street, past all the little signs and right into the fray. He follows, she leads, always the same and like always she makes him _work_ for it. They both run for what seems like hours, Natalia (Natasha?) using the compass of lost lives to find secret side streets, places to trip Clint up, to slow him down.

It doesn’t work.

The arrow nips her shoulder and she trips, lands hard on her wrist, crushing it underneath her, grinding the bones together. She rolls up and over anyway. Ready to fight. Clint doesn’t give her a chance, another arrow grazes her other shoulder and when she ducks he slips under and throws her. Battle over, didn’t even put up a fight. Where the hell is her head at?

‘You never trip,’ Clint says, coming down hard over her, and although he doesn’t know it yet, he’s just about to light the spark on a fuse he’ll never even be able to understand, ‘Who are you?’

Enter; Clint Barton.

Enter; the beginnings of a war.

‘That,’ she spits in his face along with the blood, the red tangling around her finger tips, ‘is a damn good question.’

\--

Egy: all the tribes will come and the mighty will crumble

\--

Hungarian mythology is a mess, it’s lost, it’s all over the place.

It sounds like the Norse (and in about two years, when the oldest story of all time is played out between two brothers and an over expectant father, when the second son comes to kill them all with lies and an army, when the gods are proven true, Natasha/Natalia will spend a night with absinthe and the cool side of a toilet because, oh no, _the gods are true_ ) and it reads like the Celts. The not at all secret there being that the Norse and the Celts are already tangled up in each other and that Europe itself is just a goddamn mess (a _bloody mess_ to go with the _bloody noise_ ).

There is a tree, basically, and there is a mother and holes enough for stars. There are dragons and trolls and faeries. There is everything between wonder and the mundane.

There is a place that might be heavenly (but don’t say that too loudly, some are still angry about the whole _BC_ thing) and a place that might be hellish (a great party for depraved souls, that, a _swell_ place to never go) and a place slotted between. Several usually, but again, that’s something to whisper about.  

In an old throwaway room, at the back of some abandoned alleyway of lost storytelling, Natasha is lying on the lap of an old woman, her head swimming and what feels like a lost part of her being poured back inside her skull. The old woman whispering history, mythology, back into her ears.

‘You are _tündérek,_ and you are welcome here.’ The old woman says. Behind her there are creatures dancing. Offers of darkness and salvation. Courts held in check by sculpted queens and spilling over with decadence (the word in its old meaning, before food channels and Michelin star chefs adopted it; horrifying, wild, decay) and dancing. The noise, the drumming, gets louder and it’s not all Hungary but it is all Europe. 

Natalia might thank her, she hopes not.

‘Who are you?’

The old woman looks unimpressed. ‘You know better.’

She does. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I just don’t know...’

The old woman clucks her tongue, ‘you will know what you need.’

‘I don’t-’

‘ _You will know what you need.’_ The woman hisses and there is a clang and she drowns herself asleep.

\--

Sleep, wake up. Sleep, wake up. _Sleep, wake up._

\--

His face is the first thing she sees, ghosts behind him, the war drums that usually stalk her are quiet. The mother has called them away, she thinks, wildly, and then she doesn’t think a word more. The cold, calm hands of a friendly ghost clamp her shoulders and she settles. She needs to get her head on straight, needs to work around the blood.

‘Clint,’ she says blandly, waiting for his response.

‘Natasha,’ he says, ‘what the _fuck?’_

Ghosts, she wants to say, get inside your head and never leave.

He was a monster, she wants to say.

I couldn’t let another _me_ happen, she doesn’t say.

‘I think you know me better than that.’

He pauses, and it’s the pause that gives him away, he never pauses with her except when he’s lying, ‘Red Room.’ He says finally, holding her gaze too steady.

Fucker, she thinks, the absolute fucker knew. ‘Yes. It’s over now.’

‘No it’s not.’

‘Yes it is.’

He presses on her wrist, how long has he been holding her wrist, why hasn’t she noticed? ‘ _No, it’s not._ Tasha, you just threw yourself under the bus. Fury is going to catch wind of this.’

There’s a touch on her forehead and she strains to see what’s making it, the edges blurring together. A little boy holding a sign, no, whispering to her. _Fury already knew, he accounted for it._ She thanks him silently. Repeats the words. Tongue growing heavy and the words feeling like ash. _This isn’t over, then._ She stops speaking after that. Things in her head are whiting out at the edges. Her mind naturally taking the bits she can’t deal with and pressing them into boxes she will not open, not ever. The ghosts are leaving for now, until the next time she finds herself taking action without noticing.

‘Who am I talking to?’ he asks, after an hour and a half of silence.

‘I don’t-’ she starts, reassess, ‘Natalia. You’re talking to- shit- ебем- _fasz- fuck-’_

His hand is slipping for a blade, an arrow, just in case, ‘I don’t suppose _Natalia_ would like to tell me what she’s doing here.’

She doesn’t, she can’t. _She can’t think about it._

‘I saw the _Regina_.’ She says, ‘or I saw _Bába._ ’

‘You’re not making any sense.’ He says slowly, ‘Nat, whichever Nat, can you hear me?’

‘I can here you,’ she says in Russian. The war drums start again, and Natalia begins to leave her, slinking out and letting Natasha all the way back in.

Clint tenses, ‘ _Natasha Romanov_ can you hear me?’

‘I can here you,’ she says in English, she borrows an accent from the bottom end of an Irish Catholic community, the one he says sounds like noise and garbage, just to fuck with him. The little boy laughs.

‘Natasha.’ And he’s panicking now. Alright, yes, that was mean.

‘Yes, Clint, I’m,’ fighting a war you can’t even see, ‘fine.’

‘Good.’ He lets go of her hand, ‘Because we’ve got a hell of a fight ahead of us.’

Oh _yes,_ and he doesn’t even know it yet.

\--

If it weren’t for a hundred mitigating facts she would really, really, really hate Barton.

He’s Barton when she’s thinking about hating him. Barton when he lights fires he can’t smother. Barton when he flies circles around her and leads her. A _Turul_ in truth. He’s sitting in the corner, sneaking glances around and for a moment she feels a little bad. She lied. Natalia is still here, just a little, watching the red trail after her and using the map of lost lives to tell her where she is. It’s only a moment though. The drums are starting again.

They’re in a train station, tucked into a cafe. She’s wearing a fashion forward dress and a hat she bought from an old woman on the way from the safe house. Clint is army neat in close fitting pants and a fitted shirt, tense as all hell, and when he’s tense in the particular way he is right now he doesn’t have a hope in hell of blending in. His shoulders are too wide, he’s too alert, he’s _buzzing_ and it’s noticeable. She sips her coffee. He doesn’t touch his.

‘Where are we going?’ He wouldn’t let her see the tickets, as if she was going to somehow ruin it with her eyes.

‘You’re compromised.’ He says succinctly, ‘and I need to get you out before-’

She arches a brow, ‘Before?’

‘You killed a _very important person_. Retribution may be following you.’

‘Not just retribution.’ She says, the red curling around her hand. War drums.

‘Why now, why this, why the middle of a street?’ his eyes circle the room again and she tracks them, watches him make split second life or death decisions.

‘I couldn’t tell you.’

‘Secrets.’

‘No,’ she says, tucks her tongue into her cheek, _this shouldn’t be funny,_ ‘and yes. Mostly old wives tales.’

‘What?’

‘Clint, the world is rather much bigger than just us.’ There are Norse gods in Nevada, Clint. The world is no longer mysterious, Clint.

‘Right,’ he snorts, ‘ _Baba.’_

She sighs and places two fingers on his shoulder, ‘Your American is showing.’

 He glares. She sighs again and moves her finger to his pulse. He tenses -good, he should- before relaxing. She taps her fingers, ‘You’re not telling me something.’

‘They’ve found someone.’

‘Oh?’

‘He’s got a lot of red.’

‘Hmm.’

‘ _Your_ kind of red.’

Ah, then. That’s the problem.

‘They want him dead?’

‘They want you to kill him.’

‘I thought I was meant to not do that anymore.’

‘Exceptions,’ he says with a tight voice, a low grumble meant to sound like Fury, ‘apparently make the rules.’

She snorts. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Well,’ he says, long on the end, _welllllllll,_ ‘you’re kind of _compromised_ right now.’

‘Ah,’ she says and orders a pastry; something folded with butter and cream and dried fruit.

Clint looks at her like she's lost her head. ‘A _pastry._ ’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Maybe all the purity of the body shit you give me all the goddamn time.’

She puts it in her mouth and makes a show of chewing. It’s not a hard act, the pastry is flaking perfectly, the cream is rich, and the fruit is falling apart in her mouth. It’s taken a good 100 something years for this pastry to get to her mouth, a mother to her daughter to a daughter to Natasha’s hand, ‘Have a pastry Clint.’

He goes back to stalking the scenery instead, and she finishes both his coffee and another pastry by the time the train arrives. Clint takes her bags and helps her stand, like a gallant gentleman, a soft touch on the underside of her wrist saying _play along at lovers._ She accepts an arm and flicks her leg in just the right way. ‘Touchy Barton.’

He leans in and curls around her, exactly how a besotted lover would, whispers in her ear, ‘Hush, Tasha.’

She smiles lazily, like he might just impress her one day, ‘This is big isn’t it?’

The hand on her arm tightens, the hard press of sadness, ‘Yes.’

\--

Kettő; this is not the time or place.

\--

They never get on the train.

\--

The train is late and it is dark. There are a handful of people at the station.

She can’t say what it is that sets her off but one second she’s playing along and the next danger is scrambling up the sides of her mind. _There,_ a man who threw himself on the tracks screams at her, _they’re coming from on the train._ It takes a second but she’s already moving back, finding an escape. Clint’s moving with her, spooking the crowd. When the first round of gunfire explodes the crowd is already thin at the edges, ducking for cover. She brings out a knife and flicks it at his eyes, stepping forward and breaking from Clint to grab the gun and bring it around.

Clint has already pulled a bow from _somewhere_ and is using the string as a blade. She didn’t know it could do that. Other things happen, she doesn’t try to remember it, but in the end they’re running through the streets, slick with blood. She has no new ghosts following her, thank whatever deity gave her that mercy, but she does have Clint looking at her strangely. Not dangerous strange. Not _compromised_ strange. But enough that this may require a conversation. It’s like a redux of earlier; the running. Except she’s following (chasing?) Clint and he’s not out to hurt her or hunt her (but is she hunting him?) and when they stop at a fountain she finds that she’s been gripping the blade of a knife the entire time, the cut deep and glossy. There’s a trail and she never leaves trails. ( _Get your head on straight._ )

‘Well,’ she puts a knife in her mouth, blood coating her lips, and yes, she may need time to level out if she’s risking her health and safety doing that.

‘I repeat,’ he grabs her hand and shoves it under the water, ‘what the fuck Natasha?’

‘Should we be in public?’

‘You’re scaring me.’

A street over a dead woman mourns for her husband, lost some 50 years ago. A street over from that and the horror multiplies and she can’t forget that people died here and she can’t forget that they consider her responsible, even if the deaths weren’t by her hand. There are explanations she could give him, ones he’d swallow, ones that have been swallowed by governments and agents before him. Crazy ones like, _mass hallucinations_ and _side affects of brainwashing_ which are far and away kinder than the truth, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try.’

‘I’ve got ghosts,’ she closes her eyes and concentrates on the pain, ‘and they are running me down.’

‘We’ve all got ghosts.’

‘No, _I have got ghosts._ ’ What she means to say is that she has the weight of history jammed between her shoulders, that the higher powers are pulling and pushing along her skull and pulling her strings apart. That Hungary remembers and that its old ones are just as fearfully tall as they once were. There are monsters, still, ones that know her names and her secrets and are holding her own blood against her.

‘You’re falling apart.’ He whispers.

She holds her hand open under the water again, ‘I hope you never have to know what it’s like to have something inside your head that isn’t yours.’

He does up the equation wrong, _oh this is that_ and _it’s an episode._ And he might be right, this could be a symptom of a bigger problem, but he can’t fix that and she’s got a bigger battle ahead.

‘I want you to listen very carefully,’ and, shit, she’s losing her grip on Natasha again, _get your head on straight,_ ‘I- some very strange, very bad things are going to happen. Very bad. You’ve got to know that I am-’ sorry? Small word for such a big thing, ‘not in control, I guess.’

He makes a disbelieving face, ‘You’re _Natasha Romanov,_ control is your middle name.’

‘Alianovna, actually.’ And boy does that get his back up.

‘ _Shut up,_ ’ he hisses, ‘We’re in _public._ ’

The streets move under her feet a little, a gust of air and laughter as dead things run past her. Her secrets, for now, are safe. It’s a freeing idea for a moment and just as quickly turns crawlingly claustrophobic. The secrets she has had to keep have made her.

‘It’s okay. They’re not going to let anyone get me. Not yet.’

‘Who?’

‘The Regina. The-’ _ghosts. The Hunt. The nameless old things._

And then, of course, the water erupts in flames and the curtain is dropped.

\--

The Natasha/Natalia thing is not, in fact, a terrible redux of Victor/Victoria with murder and well, murder, instead of tunes and social commentary, Clint can tell you that straight off. The first time Natalia appears they’re in a plane over Russia, the door open, preparing to leap out and avoid dying via airplane crash. He doesn’t know that when she wrenches the door open that the Natasha he’s slowly crawling towards being indescribably fond of (and loyal to, but that’s another crisis) has left the building. Doesn’t know that the woman slinging his parachute on and yelling ‘it’ll be fun, Barton, come on, _like a carousel_ ’ is not the same woman who stuck a stiletto through a man’s throat earlier.

Although, when he thinks about it over and over later the fact that she threw up should have given it away.

‘Who are you?’ she hisses, wiping away the bile.

‘Natasha?’

She narrows her eyes, ‘ _Natalia,_ ’ pauses, her lip curls, ‘Natasha. None of them. You’re American.’

‘Yeah?’ he says dumbly.

She raises her chin, queenly, ‘I do not consort with Americans. They soiled their lands and stole more when _their_ gods turned barren.’ 

‘Um,’ he says.

She glares; her eyes are shiny and black and inhuman, ‘What year is it?’

‘Two thousand and-’

‘Stop,’ she shudders and snaps, her eyes turning black to blue again, ‘shit, I guess I don’t want to know yet. We’re in Russia.’

‘Yes.’

‘I recognise it,’ she says with extreme distaste, ‘for as much as it is recognisable.’

Something happens then. The movement changes. Natasha is graceful in a predatory way. Patient and economical in her use of space. She moves like she could dance, like she could adapt to anything and make it her own. This woman looks like she's too big for her own body. She stands too tall, too rigid. Overtly rapacious where there should be subtlety.

She cracks her jaw with a loud popping noise, asks, ‘Who are you?’

‘Agent Barton.’

‘Barton,’ she says, repeats and curls her tongue over it in different languages, at some point between Polish and Chinese it gets indecent, ‘I hope you will not take it as a judgment when I say you are no threat to me.’

‘I have never in my life thought I was serious threat to you.’

She smiles, thrilled and displeased in the same note, ‘Liar.’

‘Yeah, but I’m pretty.’

‘Barton,’ she smiles around the word, ‘why are we in Russia.’

‘Why do you think we’re in Russia?’

‘A failed mission.’

‘Successful, actually.’

‘A mission.’ She rolls it around in her mouth. Spits it out. She sits down and runs through the entire clusterfuck of the last few days backwards with perfect impersonations of every valet, politician and street lord they’ve talked to. He notches an arrow at her head, holds it for fifteen minutes before she looks him straight in the eyes and shushes him. Her eyes are wide and dark and distinctly not Natasha.

‘Peace, Barton, this has all happened before.’

He watches her for two days. She eats nothing. Drinks nothing. Sits under the moonlight and knits patterns out of shadows and the heartstrings of trees. Her hair grows brighter red and deeper red, shifting from sunset to a bloody beating heart. She blows through her hands and rough, animalistic sounds, like wolf howls, answer her. Clint watches something inhuman crawl through her and then crawl out again. Natasha wakes up at the end, the old, gross parasite that was inside her smiling like the devil before whisking away on the dawn. She’s none the worse for wear, a little blank around the eyes in a way he only sees when she’s been AWOL for weeks. More like loss and hurt than actual physical pain.

She gets up, resilient, and asks why they’re still in Russia.

‘I was waiting for you to give the call.’ He replies.

She raises an eyebrow, offers him a hand and they leave. No trails and no signs. All silent on this front. 

The question, he thinks later, is not who Natasha/Natalia is, but _what_ she is.

\--

He tells no one. Doesn’t put it in the report. He’d like to say it was because it’s unbelievable. That it was a hallucination brought on by the stress of a bad mission. He would like to say it was all impossible. In fact, after a time the memories become indistinct. Where her eyes blue or green or black? Was it red or a deep orange? Was it two days or 12 hours? He can, mostly, forget it happened.

But sometimes he closes his eyes and sees sunset red fading to heart muscle and knows he’s not speaking, not even thinking about it, because the eyes in Natasha’s head were real and old and powerful.

\--

Három; if vision is the only validation

\--

The curtain rises again on a red room and a man in a chair. He is surrounded by bones and ribbons of wavering light. Hills crumble around his chair and dissolve into branches. There is a fierce wind around him. There is another man in another chair opposite him, a dark red skull bleeding out roots resting under one foot and an apple held in his hand. His chair is ornate but sparse. Ornate but sparse, a contradiction.  Between them is a tree, growing strong, twisting up and up into the sky. Both men stare at the tree. They would be old, he thinks, the men would be old if not for the tree, but as long as the tree is where it should be there will be men staring at it. Cyclical.  

Natalia says nothing.

Clint...is Clint.

‘Where are we?’

‘Hush.’ She admonishes, ‘Gods.’

Both men nod at her, breaking eye contact with the tree. The man with the apple looks at him, eye to eye, and for one searing second Clint feels laid out, measured and found amusing. The guy with the apple finds him _amusing_. The man with the apple takes a bite out of it, juice sliding down his chin, and the other man sighs. Picking up a mound of earth from next to his foot, the man surrounded by bones piles it in front of him. A ribbon of light reaches out and into the mound, wriggling out again a worm and crawling toward the tree.

Clint has the absurd feeling he’s just witnessed the miracle of life.

The man with the apple opens his mouth and a furred paw sticks out of it, soon joined by another and then a little furred face. A fox works its way out of his mouth and drops to the floor, rolling around and stumbling towards them. It shakes off dark liquid and opens its eyes, a deep almost colourless darkness, and sets about cleaning its tail. When it’s clean and well presented it opens its mouth and screams, a sound like claws wrenching out of hands and feathers stabbing into eyes pouring out of its mouth.

Clint crumbles.

Natalia blinks.

‘English, please.’ She says.

The fox cocks its head and bears its teeth.

‘Hence the please.’

The fox growls.

The man surrounded by bones flicks a finger. The fox bows its back and snaps at him.

‘Please,’ Natasha says, like it’s physically painful to ask.

The fox looks considering, weighs its decision long and hard. It opens its mouth again, ‘there are daughters, _tündérek._ And there are hunters. We do not take well to _poaching._ ’

‘I see.’

‘You brought them.’

‘It is more complicated than that.’

‘No it is not.’

‘Kill the,’ pause, ‘other hunters.’

‘Yes. And then we will let you go.’

‘Complications.’

‘Our complications.’

‘Please stop talking,’ she says politely.

The fox smiles -and how weird is that? a fox smiling- and curls its paws underneath it, a fire lights up from the ground and the fox lights up with it, dissolving into grey and orange and white smoke. The men disappear, blinking out and the memory begins to lose clarity. He can still see the tree and he still knows that if the tree exists so do the eyes that stare at it but his mind slips up on smoke-whispers that tell him that forgetting is better. He closes his eyes. He lets it go. When he opens his eyes again, Natasha is sitting across from him holding a small flask of water. He drinks the water and searches his head for the memory. It does not come.

‘I’m not crazy.’ Natasha says again, sliding the flask back into a handbag.

‘I’d rethink your definition there if you don’t fall into some spectrum of it,’ he says. ‘I’m guessing I just had the almost intolerable pleasure of meeting god and the devil?’

‘I object to your phrasing,’ she scuffs her nails on her leg, ‘you don’t understand and you wouldn’t get it if I told you.’

‘It’s not that hard to have a conversation.’

She sighs, ‘Do you believe in gods?’

‘As a concept or as a way of life?’

‘Barton.’

‘No. I do not.’

She copies him pitch for tone, flattening her vowels and making it sound sardonic, ‘then you may have to rethink your definition.’

He thinks about it. The first thing they teach you in the army, after being neat and killing people and how to make everything last three times longer than it should, is how to take all the messy shit, separate it and shover it into neatly tied, easily ignorable boxes. Then they teach you how to leave them alone. After all, one head shrink had said after his third stint in a warzone they were ridiculously underprepared for, those boxes are full of a-grade bullshit and grown men pissing themselves. Who needs that?

Nat could be a box full of crazy. Nat _is_ a box full of particular kind of crazy. But she’s like the big orange box called _that one time in Tunisia_ and that other box called _dad._ She is not to be unwrapped. Accepting what he’s pretty sure is happening means taking at least one pretty layer off the _Nat_ box. Answering some shit he’s been perfectly content looking at from a distance. It means both of them being vulnerable. The only good thing that could come of that is trust. The only bad thing, he guesses, is death but with Natasha his stakes have always been a little higher.

The hell of it is that he wants to. He’d love to trust Natasha. It feels like the _good_ kind of bad idea.

He sighs, and that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? He’d like to be able to trust her right now, ‘So, mission from god, our soundtrack better be worth it.’

‘Would you like some country, cowboy?’ She says, smile tucked lightly into the corner of her mouth.

‘Shut up.’ Clint says. ‘Why did I even tell you that story?’

‘You were impressively drunk.’

He rolls his eyes and his shoulders and sets off back the way they came.

‘Where are you going?’ She asks. She’s deliberately making noise as she walks, which is unexpected but appreciated.  He looks at her and feels something easy spread, says, ‘second best hotel in Budapest. I know you.’

\--

His room looks like someone had a heart attack in an upscale salon in New York and screamed greyscale nouveau riche correctness into everything. It’s grey or it’s a tasteful shade of beige or it’s a strange ‘accent’ of cream pretending to be deeper than it really is. There’s a table, some chairs, the exact same set up of functionality to feeling-you’ve-wasted-money that he expects is in every room. He walks around the room, anti-clockwise, checks the height of the windows and the angles of the shadows, stashes two normal arrows under the couch cushion, a trick one in a draw, a knife from the kitchen finds itself near a neatly arranged pot plant and three smaller knives near the door. He’s going to be here awhile.

He didn’t bring much in the way of clothing. There are two full changes and more underwear then is appropriate. A man can get far in clean underwear. He imagines Natasha has brought a full army of designers and couture, that’d she spread them out over the room in preparation, arranged into perfect combinations and prints. It’s a well worn fact that Natasha has always loved beauty and a worse one that beauty has not always loved her.

He’s wrong about the clothes. When he walks into her room he finds jeans and dresses and warm sweaters thrown on the bed, pockets turned inside out. There are boxes and boxes of paper. Maps on blue and gold walls. Sweets on the marble countertops. Wines and fine gold jewellery. Natasha is sitting on a chair by a window in yoga pants and a singlet looking out onto the city. She has a glass of red wine in one hand and a piece of chocolate in the other. There is a leather bound book on her lap. She looks up when he comes in, downs the wine and the chocolate and looks significantly at the low table next to the couch.  

‘There’s some reading you need to do.’ She says, pouring more wine and settling back down to read.

It’s a thick folder; pages dog eared and well read. Other sections barely touched. He flips the pages through his fingers and finds sections completely blacked out except for obvious code words and occasional names. The readable parts are strange. Flash floods in deserts. Ghostly beings filling forests at night, lighting up entire country sides with their wide empty eyes. Wild animals with human hands and human mouths. A man with springs on his feet in London. A cowboy you can’t outdraw roaming the bible belt. Animals made from stars and a thief in a tin jacket in the outback. It’s like the most surreal art film he can think of. He finds himself stuck on a sheet of bright red, words in a language he doesn’t know slipping off the edges of the page. It’s important that he looks at this page. It doesn’t make sense, seems to be wilfully disobeying reality in order to do so. Eventually he needs to blink. He looks up what feels like a moment later but the room is dark and Natasha is long gone. The clock on his phone reads 4 hours later than when he started and there is a plate of half eaten food next to him. He’s lost four hours just looking at the damn paper.

‘That happens,’ a voice says from the darkness.

There’s no one in the room with him. Another quick scan spots a shadow draped over a chair, shifting slightly. There’s no object there. No light.

‘You should know I’m a precision weapon.’ He says voice half cocky, already sliding his hand toward a weapon.

‘Oh,’ the voice rolls over him, warm sunshine in a field, ‘ _we know._ You’ve got some on your side too, ya know.’

His fingers hit a knife. A moment later a soft cold pressure wraps around his fingers and squeezes. The only thing he can do is move his fingers away. ‘Didn’t think God gave me much thought.’

The voice sighs, ‘As nice a guy as he occasionally is, he’s also a PR nightmare. No, kid, no matter what Fox news wants you to believe the capital G is not all that’s out there.’

‘So,’ Clint drawls, ‘why are you here?’

 ‘Eh, you’ll figure it out eventually. You’re not going to remember this, but you’ll have a feeling your girl is right.’

‘If I’m not going to remember why are you telling me?’

‘Kicks.’ He says gravely, flashing out.

\--

It is 9am the next time he opens his eyes. There is breakfast in front of him, he is dressed and there is jam on his tongue.

‘Son of a bitch.’ He says, putting down the coffee in his hand.

‘You probably shouldn’t say that so loud,’ Natasha says around a piece of toast.

\--

Négy; when she steps into the night please be warned

\--

‘What do we need to do?’ he asks, sliding a thin knife down his wrist sleeve.

‘You’re with me,’ she says sceptically.

‘Yeah,’ he lies, ‘yeah, I am.’

She doesn’t believe him. He can tell.

‘We need to recon this building.’ She gives him a map, a time and some money. ‘It’s an abandoned factory. There’s access to an underground bunker. That’s where they’ll take them.’

‘Who?’

She raises one eyebrow, ‘the girls they intend to have killed.’

She hands him a sweet and pushes him out the door.

The factory, it turns out, is a popular part of the art scene and today the immediate surrounding area is playing host to a makeshift fair complete with side shows, cafes and unreliable alibis. Contrary to Hollywood film making this does not, in fact, make a building easier to recon. There are people everywhere. There are couples making out, people breaking up, people trying to connect and a general mess of auditory and visual noise that makes it a general pain in the ass to actually get anywhere. It’s good he did the recon. The building has changed significantly from the plans Natasha has sprawled in her room. There are a few extensions to the surrounding buildings that ruin the line of sight. A new club that will increase foot traffic and will definitely have a security camera. Mostly it’s the ajar side door, the obvious marks that have been scrawled around and would be obvious if disturbed that would actually do them in.      

He ends up backed up next to a corner at the edge of the cafe area. There are people everywhere. One woman keeps catching his eye. She is tall and slender and symmetrical. She is the same colour as a blizzard. There is an umbrella in her hands and two men standing in a way that obviously suggests they are with her. She whistles once and the atmosphere literally changes, the air seemingly losing pressure around her and shimmering. She catches him staring and smiles lightly. He looks away and mentally rearranges the plan so they don’t have to come through here. Ten more minutes and he’s got enough to give some concrete critic to whatever Natasha has planned out.

The woman made from ice walks over, her shoes scraping across the pavement like a death march. She twirls her umbrella and the air grows colder. He doesn’t look at her, no matter how much his eyes scream at him to.

‘Who are you,’ she asks in a saccharine voice, ‘and why are you _scouting._ ’

He tries to answer, but her finger is on her heart and he can feel his own beating faster in response.

‘They’ve cheated,’ she says with such huge disappointment, a parent ashamed of her child, ‘the Russian is allowed and there is too much wrongly taken blood for her to be anything but a pawn. You,’ she taps her heart and holds a finger there, his slows down, _ba-dump, baaa-dump, baaaaa-dump,_ ‘were dunked in a creek with _intent_ and _you_ are unwelcome.’

She takes his air next, cools it down until he can feel it turning to rivers inside him, cools it down until his eyes begin to droop and black lights flutter behind his eyes. She twists her fingers and whirlpools ignite in his lungs, slowly drowning him in the street.

‘Clint Barton. You should go home.’

‘Nah,’ he slurs, ‘this is almost getting fun.’

‘Almost?’ she smiles with tiny knives for teeth, ‘I should eat you.’

‘Have to buy me dinner at least.’

‘Would you eat it?’

‘No.’

‘ _Liar,’_ she hisses, ‘you would eat from me.’

And yeah, the sexual connotation of this conversation has gone way past acceptable. He tries to break away from her but she’s having none of it. She moves as he does. Forward, to the side, and he can feel the blood in his feet quicken. There’s music starting up.

‘You should have left. I would’ve let you.’ She says, hand clawing at his side almost in a waltz hold. 

‘I still can.’

‘So stubborn.’ She smiles like glaciers sliding into the sea, so cold it burns all the way down, ‘I am not as cold as I look.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘I should keep you for one dance. Just a dance.’ She croons. Her hand curls and he presses closer to her. The sick kind of fear pooling in the base of his spine. Adrenaline. She feels like jumping off a trapeze with no net. She feels like he should be so much more scared than he is.

‘No.’ he clenches his jaw to say it. Her fingers trailing over a knot of scar tissue and pressing down. Cold, then hot, then cold; all to the beat of the music.

She sighs, fingers digging deeper, ‘You would be warmer than you know. You’d never miss. You’d never stumble. All those pesky limits.’

‘No.’

She presses closer, lines them up till there face to face, she’s taller now, her heels are gone and her hands are cradling his face, like a lover, like a child. ‘Brighter, harder, colder, stronger, limitless, powerful. So strong and so mine _just say yes._ ’

‘ _No_.’

They stop dancing. She traces her lips over his collarbone and shrugs, ‘I am patient.’

Law of the jungle says you never turn your back on a predator. Never show weakness, your belly, an eye. Clint is off target. He steps away non-threateningly, which is mistake one. Mistake two is turning his back. Mistake three is running.

‘You should never run from _me_ Clint Barton.’ She says mockingly. ‘I _like_ chasing.’

The men at the tables stand. One from each table, some in the middle of conversations. Their partners still talking to air. They change all together. Sliding their skins off and curling into their true forms. Talons and feathers and curled horns. He can hear them pounding after him, screaming and grunting.

‘Oh, fuck me.’ He says and then he runs harder.

\--

Öt; oh america can I owe you one

\--

So he runs and they chase and he runs and they chase.

The ground changes under his feet and he regrets not reading more fairytales as a kid. Things appear and disappear and reappear different. Roots from trees that have long since been culled and built over wrap around his ankles and try to pull him down. He feels _her_ breath, the dancing woman, the Cold Queen, licking at his neck. Fierce and cold and slipping inside him. He turns a corner and up ahead is a slim shot of brightness. He shoots for it, tripping over and back into the present from the Old Woods, the Queens’ touch loosening from his neck.

The street is bright and sparsely populated. The buildings are regular. There’s a man sitting up against a wall, ordinary, unsuspicious, the sort of hat he hasn’t seen since Kentucky is tipped over his eyes. The man speaks and it feels like coming home again. The warm sinking in completely. Clint makes a beeline for him, feeling better with every step.

‘Hey, sir, excuse me, but I heard you talking and I thought we might have something in common.’ He says from a foot away, settling into a non threatening posture.

‘I say we might,’ his eyes light up like cornfields, like the ones he travelled through and heard stories about when he was a child, blue days and dry husks, ‘you’re far from home, boy.’

Clint can’t look him in the eyes. ‘It happens sometimes.’

The cowboy leans forward and swipes his fingers on his shoulder, Clint tenses, stops himself from attacking by a hair trigger. The cowboy shakes his fingers and a few drops of red stick to them, not red like bleeding; red like crushed things, heart muscles, red like clotting and old blood. The noise dies; just him and the old cowboy in a bubble of silence. ‘And you’re absolutely covered in red.’

Because of course he can’t meet a nice old man in the middle of the street while on the run from supernatural thugs. That would be positively _nice._

‘Hmm,’ he sticks the blood in his mouth and hums around the fingers, pulls them out with a slick popping noise, obscene in the sudden silence, ‘you stay careful, boys like you end up dead for pretty girls like that.’

‘I’m always careful,’ Clint says, the other man looks both expectant and incredulous, ‘sir,’ he offers tentatively.

‘ _Sir,_ ’ he smiles, wide and cracked and _horribly old,_ ‘not many with that honour are there?’

‘No sir,’ Clint tries to smile back, ‘not with much sincerity.’

Might make something of him yet, _Jesus fucking Christ._

Or not, actually.

Shit _._

\--

Natasha barely looks up from her plans.

‘Lost time?’ She says neutrally, fingers plotting out a path.

It’d taken him three hours and six detours to finally lose his tails. Judging from the plant life smudged across his feet and up his pants losing his tails required stomping through Montana and Middle Earth. Apparently physics are a sometimes thing with these guys.

‘Yeah.’ He takes off his shoes and water comes out. He does, vaguely, remember running through a waterfall, ‘Do we have a plan?’

‘Yeah,’ she raises her eyes and gestures towards some bandages and food sitting on the kitchen bench, ‘it’s not pretty.’

‘Is it ever pretty?’ Snapshots of a half dozen ops. Snow and sun and broken arms and a man with his hands all over them both the wrong way. Wars are not beautiful.

‘We have to kill them.’ He can hear her unease.

He wonders what that’s about. She’s not trigger happy but she will make the death play if she has to. An uneasy nights sleep will not be new. 

‘Yeah,’ he pulls off his shirt and pants, ‘you need sleep.’

‘I need them gone.’

‘You need sleep more.’

‘I really can’t see how that could be true.’ She says deadpan. ‘You met someone.’

‘Oh baby, you’ve always been the only one for me.’ He says equally as flat.

She hums and strikes out an exit point on the map. Too high profile. ‘Liar, was she prettier? Where her breasts perkier? Did she let you buy that dumb purple vest?’

‘You’re always the perkiest.’ He rolls his shoulders, ‘I don’t know who he was but he sure as hell knew me.’

‘That happens a lot.’

‘Does it?’

‘There are gods in Nevada, Clint.’

The world is enormous, Clint.

‘I don’t want to deal with this.’

Three more strikes and they have a standard entry and exit plan with two backups. He’ll correct it to account for a few increased security measures and then they’ll argue about who takes point.   

‘I really don’t.’

Natasha blinks and the light tilts with her. He forgets, sometimes, how bright she can be. She grasps a new pen seemingly from nowhere and draws bright silver across the page. He sees words he can’t read flow out and over it. She writes until the page is covered, over and over, and with one twirl of her wrist connects the first line to the last. Making the writing disappear. Words appear three seconds later in the same twirling silver. She nods, pleased, and closes the maps, pulling out folders and spreading them on the table. She draws symbols on each of the folders and they both watch as the silver eats away at the paper. Turning the paper to ink and the ink to nothing.

‘Natasha, why us?’

She doesn’t answer him. Just sighs and rises to grab a glass of water. She leaves a ledger on the table, leaking with red edged paper and photos of things from storybooks. If he looks closer, he knows without knowing, he will find a hundred mutilated corpses. If he looks closer, he will see the weight of modern history wearing the faces of fantastical creatures. If he looks closer he will never be able to turn away again, he will never close his eyes.

He keeps his eyes wide open.

Natasha, with her red hair battered and bruised the shade of roses, with no supernatural brightness about her at all, smiles bitterly and nods.

‘Okay,’ she says, ‘I’ll tell you.’

\--

Hat: didn’t you ever meet a girl who was born the victim of a name

\--

She tells a horrible tale-

See, Red Room he knows about. Black Widow he knows about.

The fucking secret experiments on mythical creatures he did not know about.

They all happened at the same time, she says, she was fed lies about being a ballerina and taught to kill and taught to hide and taught to lie and things from fairytales were butchered and hurt and bleed for secrets. At the time they had no idea, she says, no idea that the _other_ was so old or so violent. That their memories were at once so exact and meticulous that they’d string up their abductors and place every cut in the same position and yet so wildly prone to overreaction that they’d disappear entire villages and _eat people_. That they’d see the taking and killing of a few as war on all and _every one of them_ asresponsible.

That, Natasha says, is an inability to learn from history and mythology.

The next bit is hard for her to think about. Her mind naturally rolling away from the worst of it. There was blood spilt and mixed, she thinks, certainly she could never shut out their voices. It’s the curse, she says, that fell on all of them; they’d never forget the screams. It’s worse here; in places that are already old and battle scarred and angry. 

He makes a joke about her natural grace and agility. She does not laugh.

‘You’re not really 27 then.’

She rolls her eyes, ‘You knew that.’

That he did.

‘Why the girls.’

‘I imagine it didn’t occur to them to _stop._ I was never meant to be sent here.’

‘You weren’t sent.’

She stops talking. Looks at her hands. ‘There’s only one person with my kind of red.’

‘Who?’

She looks at him and looks away. Signalling the conversation as over. Which is unfair, really, because it was her half formed segue.

‘You killed a man in the street. Who was he?’

‘I don’t know,’ he can see that she really doesn’t, ‘I just knew he was here and that I had to kill him.’

He doesn’t say how out of character that is for her. How strange. How wrong. He can see that she knows. He can also see the things she isn’t telling him. He doesn’t push her on that either. 

\--

[ music pt 1](http://www.mediafire.com/?xjjxv3lst08cc)


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